Diabetes, group training and raising your VO2 max

Welcome to the end of another week and another Stuff We Like post! It’s already Valentine’s Day weekend (I’m not sure I like how a day becomes a weekend, but there you go), so most of you beautiful people will no doubt have plans. For the record, I’m thinking an excellent Sunday lunch followed by watching Deadpool feels like the right plan this year, whether alone or with your significant other.

For when you’re not busy with fun and romance, we have five entries this week for you to read, covering increasing your fitness levels and why you probably should do, assessing clients in group settings, a straightforward guide to diabetes, a comprehensive glossary of strength and conditioning terms and why you’re probably not growing muscle.

Rusty Moore delivers this two part series discussing why fit people may get the most out of exercise when it comes to fat loss, why you may need to change the way you exercise as you age, and then how to go about raising your VO2 max with a simple yet effective eight week program. There’s plenty to consider as to how such ideas apply to your middle aged clients.

More of you are training your clients in group settings than ever before. George Kalantzishas has written a very useful blog post here about how best to go about assessing your clients in different group settings and how to help them progress during their sessions.

I was reminded of this blog post from last year recently as I discussed the issues surrounding Type 2 diabetes in our country and what it could mean long term for our health service. In this blog post, Mark Sisson takes us through a simple explanation of, as he puts it, “the entire insulin/blood sugar/type 2 diabetes mess“. Well worth a few minutes of your time to better understand just what sort of issues we’re facing as a population and why.

There’s a lot of specific terminology in the strength and conditioning world. Art of Manliness have collected and made a comprehensive guide as to what all those terms mean. Worth a read and keeping to hand if you’re still relatively new to some areas of strength and conditioning training.

I really enjoyed this post from Lee Boyce about people who profess to be hardgainers but almost certainly aren’t. It reminded me of a post I read a few years ago on a forum I belong to where someone who was having difficulty gaining weight had effectively given up on training because his supplements hadn’t arrived. All the face palms in the world…